


The Constant

by meggannn



Category: Steins;Gate
Genre: Banter, Christmas, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Panic Attacks, Post-Series, Ten Years Later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28462212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meggannn/pseuds/meggannn
Summary: It’s not a date. Granted, not many single people would travel an hour out of the city to pick up another single friend, exchange gifts, wait all night for the single friend to wrap up work, and take that single friend to an arranged dinner on one of the most popular date nights in Japan. They’re notnothing, but they’re certainly Not Dating, just like Kurisu is his Not Girlfriend, and he isn’t her—Oh, who is he kidding. It’s a date.
Relationships: Okabe Rintarou | Hououin Kyouma/Makise Kurisu
Comments: 15
Kudos: 41





	The Constant

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in Steins;Gate worldline, December 2020, so most of the main cast is therefore in their late 20s. I wanted to explore what Okabe and Kurisu's lives might be like once they had grown up a little, professionally and personally.
> 
> A few notes:
> 
>   * Japan typically celebrates Christmas on December 24, not December 25.
>   * There are no Steins;Gate 0 spoilers, although Maho Hiyajo is here. There is also no attempt at compliance here with the other SciADV series.
>   * The characters in Steins;Gate are nerds, of course, but their type of nerdiness is obviously the Japanese netizen kind, which I am not familiar with. I decided that the English dub did a great job of localizing Japanese jokes and memes without losing the spirit of their banter, so I would take inspiration from that, and I think anyone reading this might be more familiar with the English side of the internet, anyway. Also, keeping in mind that Kurisu is at least somewhat culturally American too, I think there is a lot of wiggle room with her (and Maho) for western jokes and media.
>   * Viktor Chondria University is apparently modeled after Columbia University in Manhattan, which really screws with my headcanon that Kurisu is a California girl (as is implied by Episode 25/OVA of the Steins;Gate series). I have rationalized it that Viktor Chondria has campuses in New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo, but Kurisu's mother is in California, and Kurisu might be working on any campus any given year.
>   * The Steins Gate worldline is not our own, so I feel justified in writing a fic in which COVID-19 does not exist in this version of 2020. At the time of this posting, Japan is still struggling with the virus, and as Kurisu and Okabe are both scientists, they would not be going out on dinner dates if COVID existed in the Steins Gate worldline. Stay safe, wear a mask if you go out, and take care of yourselves!
> 


Assistant  
  
**December 21, 15:03**  
Lab Member 004, an emergency gathering of senior-level LabMem has been called for a meeting of the minds this Thursday evening. RSVP promptly so that a location may be chosen.  
I suppose the fact that this Thursday just so happens to be one of the most popular date nights in Japan is entirely coincidental and not planned in any way?  
The timing of any western holidays is irrelevant. Also, does my assistant like Italian?  
I don’t know who your assistant is, but *I* love Italian. However, I refuse to partake in the company of one Hououin Kyouma.  
Dr. Hououin may come as he pleases. The behavior of a mad scientist is as turbulent as the wind and as unreliable as your university schedule.  
What, exactly, does the imaginary Hououin Kyouma have a doctorate in?  
Mechanical engineering, astrophysics, and also whatever it is you’re studying, he’s done it already.  
Pass.  
…To answer your question, Dr. Hououin’s notoriety would put him in danger of any Organization assassins lurking the premises. A representative will be sent in his stead.  
Be here at seven.  


* * *

“It’s not my fault you still use your dad’s wind-up watch from the 80’s,” Kurisu dismisses over the phone, greatly exaggerating its age, but Okabe decides not to argue the point. “You said you’d be here at seven, and it’s no longer seven. I’ve moved on.”

“I called you as soon as I realized!”

“I’ve got an extra hour of work out of it, perhaps two or even three, if I feel like staying late today. It’s not like I have any prior engagements anymore. Oh, look, here I go booting up the electroencephalogram. Maybe I can dissect my own brain by the time you show up.”

“Good,” he laughs. “Give it a go. Maybe you’ll discover the answer for why the woman waiting for me is so hard-hearted and uncompromising to make me travel all the way out into the sticks to collect her for what, by all accounts, should have been a relatively simple evening out to dinner before she holes herself back up in her lab until 2021.”

“It’s because the woman has been waiting years, not just hours, my friend. Do you have an actual reason you don’t use your phone to keep the time like everyone else in the twenty-first century, or…?”

He couldn’t put the answer to that, exactly, into words. If he tried to, something about familiarity and tangibility, the comfort of an old-fashioned watch, and the ability to hold onto a timekeeping piece that made consistent sense would surely come out tumbling of his mouth making very little sense and undoubtedly dragging his thoughts to dark places. So he doesn’t try to articulate them.

“Old-world charm,” is what he ends up saying, and Kurisu snorts at him from the other line.

The bus pulls up to his stop. Okabe ignores the odd looks he’s getting from other passengers. He would never admit to waiting for the doors to slide open like a dog about to be taken for a walk, but he does leap off the bus into the chilly air when they finally do release him, and he prepares for the long hike—well, a jog—fine, he is sprinting—up to the Brain Science Institute.

“There,” he pants over the phone. “You hear me panting? That’s my apology. You’re making me sweat in my suit.”

“The day you wear a suit is the day I’ll perform my own transorbital lobotomy.”

“Yeesh.” He wheezes out a breath. The cold bites against his face and freezes his lungs, but keeps his feet pounding against the pavement. “That sounds painful.”

“Are you outside the building yet?”

“You hear me still running, don’t you?” He catches his breath and turns a hard corner and dashes through the parking lot of the institute. “Give me a few minutes.”

“Maybe I won’t let you inside. Maybe I’ll keep you waiting out there for an hour in the cold on Christmas, like you made me wait.”

“Wouldn’t work,” he says. “I’d try to pry open the doors and get taken in by building security and dragged to their underground basement where they watch cam footage and eat rice crackers all day, and I’d call you every five minutes to come pay my bail.”

“I’d let you starve there for the night. The entire night. Christmas night. Have I mentioned that you kept me waiting on Christmas?”

“I’m in sight of the building!”

“Get an automatic watch while you’re out,” she says, and hangs up.

“Once again, you are completely unsympathetic to the common man’s plight, Christina,” he announces to his phone as he jams it into his pocket. “Why I ever deigned to take on someone so callous as my assistant, I will never know.” He passes the first two buildings—these all look the same, no matter how many times he comes here—and makes it to the entry doors of the research laboratory, where she said she’d meet him at 19:00.

True to Kurisu’s word, she is indeed no longer waiting at the front door to let him into the lab. But Maho is.

“Better hurry, pal,” Maho says smugly as she swings the door open. “Perhaps she has another not-boyfriend at the other building entrance waiting to take her on a not-date.”

“Ha, ha,” Okabe says, or tries to say through pants. He welcomes the heat inside the building and leans over, palms on his knees, gasping for his breath. Despite his warm coat, he can already feel sweat in his shirt and under his armpits—eughh.

“Here’s your badge.”

Okabe puts the lanyard around his neck. Strictly speaking, as a guest, he should be taking his photo and getting a new ID every time he enters the building. But the benefit of personally knowing two top researchers at the institute and befriending several others tends to work in his favor, so they keep an old ID for him whenever he makes the hike all the way out here. The only downside to this arrangement is that he hates his picture on the stupid thing: it was taken seven years ago, back when he still wore that food-stained lab coat everywhere and he still got that deer-in-headlights look at the thought of seeing Christina in a professional context outside the Future Gadgets Lab, and he was never brave enough to ask them to go out of their way to make him a new one.

“Think you can stand a short walk to the elevator, or will you pass out?”

Indignant at this, he stands up on shaky knees—to the full extent of his not-insignificant height, thank you very much. “I’ll have you know I was my school’s top track and field star for two years running.”

Maho rolls her eyes and leads him down the hall. “You were?”

“No. But I carried it off for a second, didn’t I?”

“Well those long legs must’ve gotten stretched out somehow.”

“The possibility that I am simply blessed with the respectable genes of tallness never occurred to you?”

“With the way you survived on cup ramen and iced coffee from May Queen’s until the age of twenty-five, no, I think relying on your genes to carry all of the work and then some, is quite definitely off the table of consideration.”

They enter the elevator and Okabe punches the button for the seventh floor before Maho can reach up for it.

“I love our chats,” Okabe tells her, grinning, to which she grunts, glaring at the wall—all five feet of her.

When they enter the lab, Kurisu is hunched over a confocal microscope in the back corner of the room, and does not look up when they walk in.

“Hello, Hiyajo,” she says pointedly.

Maho snorts and heads to the back of the room, scooching past a plastic, ornamented Christmas tree, to a door that separates the lab from the offices. “I’ll be in the back. Enjoy your date.”

“It’s not a date,” they both say at the same time.

“You two are terrible at this,” Okabe hears Maho mutter as the door closes behind her. And then they’re alone.

He meanders through the aisles, past the computers and a bag-strewn chair, to Kurisu’s back, which is stiff and uncompromising. He leans over her shoulder, resisting the urge to bury his face in that wonderful red hair, even wound up into a loose bun as it currently is. “Looking at anything interesting?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m not looking at,” she tells her samples. “A nice meal in a restaurant, as was promised to me by someone three days ago. And followed up on perhaps as recently as this morning, in fact, by someone whose name is no longer saved in my phone.”

Ouch. He doesn’t believe her, of course. He peers to her left, where two monitors are showing images of blue smears—neurons and genes lighting up cells in tiny pink and green dots. They look like one of those “spot the differences” tests, where he can barely tell the two apart. But Kurisu has drawn circles around spots and written notes across both images outlining the discrepancies between each.

“Can I give you my gift?” he asks.

“Depends. Can I eat it without looking away from these genes?”

Okabe digs into his shoulder bag and takes out a snowflake-patterned package that even Mayuri, for all of her skills, had not been able to teach him how to wrap properly. “I regret to inform you it is inedible.”

“Figures. Okay, let’s have it.”

“Wait, where’s mine?”

“You have forfeited the equivalent exchange of mutual gift-giving due to today’s tardiness.” Kurisu sighs and pushes away from the microscope, turning to face him, and Okabe stares in shock.

“What’s that on your face?”

“What?”

“That—” He gestures. ”The black stuff. Are your eyes okay?”

Kurisu stares at him, flabbergasted, for a long moment, before her face screws up in anger. “It’s eye shadow!”

“Eye shad—you mean that’s _makeup_?”

“This is why we don’t do this kind of thing more often,” Kurisu says furiously, scrubbing at her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. Her other hand frantically grabs something on the counter behind her back—he recognize it as a makeup kit, one he would bet that Mayuri got her—and shoves it into her pocket.

Ah, _shit_. “Hey—er, hey,” Okabe says, placing the package on the counter so he can reach up to gently take her wrists. He recognizes vaguely that she has tried to look differently tonight, tried something new, and it’s enough to make him appreciate that he’s messed up. He is aware that he has only seconds to fix this until it becomes unsalvageable. “I’m sorry, that was—I’m sorry. Wait. You don’t have to take it off.”

Her eyes are closed, and while most of the eye shadow is off, a fair amount is now smudged across the bridge of her nose and under her eyes. She’s too embarrassed to look at him.

He feels tight with shame, recognizing that this small effort to look nice on her part was immediately met with what she believed was derision.

“If you really want it off, I might have tissues in my bag,” he says, deciding to try for humor, “but I could also smear it on too and we could just go like this and pretend we’re doing a thing together.”

Kurisu snorts and doesn’t open her eyes. She takes another wipe—some is still on her eyelids in large, uneven patches, so the effect is now somewhat skunk-like, though he would never say so aloud. “Yours is over there.” She points to a small red bag sitting on the chair, the paper handles tied together with thin green packaging ribbon.

Okabe takes his own blue package off the counter, tosses it up to her head, and grabs his gift from the chair while Kurisu splutters and fumbles the catch. He sits in the now vacated chair and hooks his foot around the leg of another, dragging it closer so he can prop his legs up.

Kurisu, having collected her gift from the floor, raises an eyebrow and, with very little debate, sits on top of his ankles, uncomfortably forcing the soles of his feet down to meet the chair seat.

“Ow!”

“You steal both chairs in the lab, what do you expect?”

“What kind of shoddy lab only has two chairs?”

“There are others in the next aisle, but I’m not getting them for you.”

“Well you’ll have to get one for yourself, because both of these are taken.” He wiggles his feet under her bottom, and is rewarded by Kurisu-Trademarked Look of Annoyance 4, which he hasn’t seen since that time in the lab in July, when he peeled off his sweat-stained shirt and draped it over her head when she was busy at the PC, furiously engaged in a dungeon raid.

“Before you ask, it’s not that strategy guide on Fire Elemental you were asking Hashida for your birthday,” Kurisu says as she begins tearing into her gift. Okabe hurries to catch up and quickly gets tangled in the ribbon of her gift bag. “Although why anyone needs a strategy guide for that game, I think you’re playing with your eyes closed, it’s really not that hard…”

She yanks the light blue wrapping paper off and stops talking, staring at the pink and white toy underneath: a limited-edition at-channel character plushie that was only available at Comima this past fall, being sold at a huge booth with a line full of young women and poor boyfriends that snaked around two corners of the display hall. When Okabe returned to the others in the food court after waiting in the line for two hours, he had refused to tell Faris and the others where he had been. But Mayuri had caught his eye and began laying out all of her purchases on the table, wrapping each of her gifts slowly in cute wrapping paper while he patiently held down corners or offered her strips of tape, an impromptu tutorial in gift-wrapping for plushies and souvenirs of different sizes and shapes just for him, for which he was eternally grateful. He had not offered his own purchase up to the table for wrapping, as he suspected Mayuri had been hoping for, but had tried his hand at it alone in the lab on another day, with mixed results.

None of that matters now that Kurisu has torn the paper—and his hard work at folding the edges as neatly possible—apart in three seconds flat, but he always enjoys rendering her speechless.

“This is from that limited-time-only stock at Comima back in September?” Kurisu asks now, awestruck. “You didn’t get me this.”

“I sure did, Chestnut Rice and Kamehameha.”

It’s like flipping a switch every time: she turns bright red and stammers, “I don’t even use that handle anymore.”

“Oh, you and Kamehameha are intrinsically linked in the vast, wondrous, and indelible world that is the internet messaging boards, my dear assistant.”

She holds her open hand up to his face, the signal for _shut up_. “Ignoring you for the moment to appreciate my new boyfriend,” she says. “I wonder what I should call him. Hououin-san, maybe. The only one who could ever be worthy of such a name.”

Okabe’s smirk drops immediately into a scowl.

Kurisu pinches its face with both hands, rubbing her thumbs on the pink cheek pads. “This is good quality material. It’ll last in the wash.”

“Well I should hope so, if they’re not making any more of them.”

She hesitates, and Okabe knows the difference between Kurisu’s hesitations and her pauses: She’s trapped in the tight-chest period that comes before you figure out how to work “thank you” past your throat.

It’s a situation they’re both familiar with, as two stubborn people making circles of mutual attraction around each other for years are likely to be. He decides to nudge her in the right direction. 

“This is the part where you say—” He reaches over and takes one of her hands from the bear—or dog, or sheep, or whatever that thing is—and places it mockingly onto his cheek, imitating a high-pitched voice which admittedly sounds nothing like hers: “‘ _Kyouma-senpai, thank you so much for this gift I never would have gotten from America! Are you asking me to be your girlfriend?_ ’”

Kurisu yanks her hand free and lightly shoves his face away, so that he’s now staring back at the fuzzy blue neurons on screen. Then, before he can register, her hand moves down to his jaw—cups it gently, and her lips are pressing a kiss to the side of his mouth.

She’s beet red by the time he turns his face back, and avoiding his eyes again—still so embarrassed, after all this time, but that’s quite all right with him.

“I believe I have won that gift exchange,” he declares.

“You always jump to premature conclusions,” Kurisu says. “Go on, open yours.”

He does. Or, he tries. Well. He _tries_ to free the ribbon from its intricate bowtie for several long, frustrating seconds, actually—and Kurisu’s curved brow raises higher and higher as he struggles—until he’s quite certain he’s worked it into a worse knot than it had been at the start.

“Remind me what it is you studied in undergrad again?”

“Shame on you, Christina, to dare act as though this is any fault of mine—when you bestow a gift upon a recipient, you’re not meant invoke the spirit of the Gordian Knot.”

“Mechanical engineering, that’s right,” she says, clapping her hands. “Isn’t that a very technical science? Probably requires a lot of precision and acute accuracy. But what do I know.”

Okabe, frustrated, puts his gift down on the counter and spins around, looking for a drawer. “Where are your scissors?”  
  
“That’s cheating.”

“I don’t care. We’ll be here all night if we wait on your blasted knot-tying to make itself sensible. Let me grab some scissors from the office and then we’ll get going, I can open it after we order at the restaurant.”

Kurisu doesn’t get up off of his feet but holds a hand up instead, looking at him guilty. “Okabe…”

“What?”

“I have to finish something before we go. Can we hold off just—half an hour?”

“Are you serious, you started something while you were waiting for me? What is it, test results or something?”

“I’m waiting on my research partner in America to answer my emails, actually,” she bites out, looking annoyed at the prospect that someone could dare to be sleeping on the other side of the world on Christmas. “He sent me about five hundred photos of these samples that took three hours to download, but then they turned out to be the wrong frequency, and he still owes me pictures from the other set of samples I ordered last week, so I’ve been waiting here all day and it’d be really great if we could get them finished so I could present tomorrow morning—”

“And you were pesting _me_ about being late?”

She grimaces and mouths _Sorry_. The way she does when she can’t concede a perceived failure of hers out loud—which is how he knows it’s sincere.

“What’s that?” Okabe raises his phone to his ear. Kurisu looks confused for a half-second, and then her face quickly cycles through the stages of annoyance, reluctant amusement, and finally, resignation. “An unfortunate circumstance hiding such a serendipitous chance at redemption? What a brilliant idea—if I unwravel this infernal present before my assistant finishes her work, she’ll pay for dinner!”

“I never agreed to that.”

“You are as wiley as ever, my unnamed, omnipresent friend. El. Psy. Kongroo.” He puts his phone away and now sheds his coat, draping it over hers on the chair.

Kurisu is glaring at him as he puts his phone away, but without malice. “Better get to it,” she says. “You’ve really worked that thing into a mess.”

The knot does, indeed, look less like a bowtie and more like a tight ball clustered in the center of the ribbons at this point, but he is undeterred. “You should know by now that you will never see the founder of the Future Gadgets Lab back down from a challenge, madam.”

“And never admit that he’s in over his head, either, apparently.”

A confused response springs to his tongue—she’d seen it plenty of times in Akihabara that summer, what on earth is she talking about?—before remembering, of course, that this Kurisu is not the same as the one who found him crying on an overpass, saw him break down in a dim lab while it downpoured outside—would never be the same.

He closes his mouth. Annoying, really, how this still happens, even all this time later.

Okabe sits cross-legged on the floor and fiddles with the knot for a while, cursing the shortness of his nails, and debating whether using a letter opener would be cheating.

Kurisu works down the aisle. She is alternating between marking up what looks like student papers and typing something on her phone; he knows she is debating calling her colleague herself, likely waking up the pour soul that is currently sound asleep on the other side of the world.

He spares a thought that if this takes a while, they will be late for his dinner reservation. Antsy, he checks the time.

“If you want a break from that, my Switch is in my bag,” Kurisu says.

Genuinely surprised, he asks, “You bring your Switch to work?” Not that Okabe wouldn’t if he had one, but he expected better from Celeb 17. It does not, however, stop him from reaching over to her bag.

“Well if you’re really bored, Maho might have her gaming laptop in the back room, too. I think she has League installed.”

“You two are so American.” He wakes up her Switch and scrolls through a host of English titles on her console. “Where are the Japanese games? The dating sims, the steamy otome games you hide from me? I’m disappointed in you.”

“Listen, Genji main, I don’t think you’re one to talk about Japanese gaming loyalty.”

“Ah, _twelve hundred hours_ on Animal Camping?! And you say you have no time to help around the lab!”

“Wait—don’t mess up my island!”

“The town of Tapioca is safe for now,” he says, booting up the program. He has plans for her island, of course, that namely involve turning her entire house into a lab befitting a mad scientist, and teaching all of her villagers to shout EL PSY KONGROO whenever they greeted her. Or call her “Zombie,” which he thinks would bear some particularly entertaining results; he hasn’t used that nickname in a while.

“—oh, GODDAMMIT.”

Bewildered, he asks, “What is it now?”

“No, I just realized—” To his slight alarm, Kurisu is staring down miserably at a box filled to the brim with what looks like dozens of identical books. “I have to send these out for our next D&I book club. And publish the minutes from the last meeting. Another stupid thing I signed up to be in charge of.”

“D&I?”

“Diversity and Inclusion.”

“You’re in a book club?”

“We meet once a month. But there are so few women in STEM at Vicktor Chondria, and those that are, are usually afraid of being made fun of for joining, or something. It’s mostly me and, like, two older women across the departments talking to a room full of white American guys. But they’re both tenure and have families and I’m, y’know, in my twenties, so they figure I have all the time in the world.” Her face is red, screwed up dangerously. He worries for a brief second that she might start stress-crying. “Which means I’m the one that inevitably does all the work to come up with the next book we’re reading, and posts discussion topics, and nags people in the group chat to reply, and bothers the department head every quarter for our funding…”

Okabe chews that over for a moment. Kurisu doesn’t talk much about her experience as a Japanese woman in the States; when the topic has come up previously, it was nearly always with annoyance, but rarely the sort of anger he’s seeing now. She preferred to save her fire for her colleagues in the metaphorical battlefield that was her lab work. The answer to him seems obvious—to delegate the administrative work to someone else—but Kurisu has always been fiercely independent and unabashedly prideful, so he can imagine how that suggestion would play out. Trying to understand her thinking, he ventures, “Surely you wouldn’t want your male colleagues to be leading this type of work in your place?”

“No. I definitely wouldn’t. It’s a Catch-22”—He has no idea what that is—“and there aren’t many others on the Japanese campus who are even willing to talk openly about this kind of thing. Everybody thinks of America as this diverse place where you can do anything, but in reality, they still see you as an outsider, especially when you weren’t born there. Nobody wants to rock the boat. If I hadn’t taken charge, nobody else would have.”

There is a lot to pick apart there. “What about Maho?”

“She’s not in the group. She doesn’t work on the American campuses enough for her to really weigh in on what she sees, and what they can do better.” She puts her faces in her palms again. “If I send the books now, they’re not gonna get there in time for the next meeting.”

“When is it?”

“January fifth.”

“Well, ebooks exist.”

She barks a laugh.

“What’s so funny? You do have ebooks in the Federated States, do you not?”

“Yeah… it’s just that everyone voted on paper books when we started this thing, and not everybody has an ereader…”

“Then that’s what libraries are for. Don’t snort, I’m serious. Send out an email explaining that you are working late on Christmas to first establish a generous amount of sympathy, and explain that the laws of physics and current aerospace technology will not allow print books to reach their domains within the next fortnight, so they can either consent to digital copies, or agree to push the meeting out. I’ll even draft the message, if you so desire.”

“No, thanks. I’ll just have to rewrite it.”

“My English is more than fluent enough!”

“More like I don’t want to weird anybody out with your theatrics.”

“Ah-huh-huh, a bunch of unhumorous pencil-pushers, are they?”

“Oh, just…” Looking as if she is doing this against her better instincts, she shoves her laptop at him and goes back to her binder. “I have too much to do before we can leave, otherwise I would never dare. Don’t make me regret this.”

Okabe cracks his knuckles and switches to the English language setting on her keyboard. “Yes, ma’am.”

* * *

“There,” Okabe grunts triumphantly after half an hour. He reaches up to place the open laptop on the counter next to her without getting up from the floor. “Doctor Hououin has been here nary an hour and has already solved one of his woeful assistant’s many problems. Next?”

“My god, please don’t _ever_ call yourself ‘Doctor Hououin’ again. You still aren’t done with your doctorate.”

“If it ever gets done,” he mutters under his breath.

“Hmm?”

“Forget it. Do you need help creating shipping labels for these books, then?”

“Uh…” She looks at the box, and then back to him. “Well, if you want to keep busy…”

“Assistant o’ mine,” he says, spreading his hands, “there’s little _to_ do until you have wrapped up your neverending errand list.”

“Every time you call me ‘assistant,’ the list grows five items longer.”

“Heeyyyyy, look what I found under a box of protein samples!” Maho busts out of the back room wearing fuzzy brown antlers and a large, red reindeer nose.

“Oh, god,” Kurisu groans, “where did you find those?”

“Rumiko must have left them behind before she moved to Hokkaido. I think she’s the only one who celebrates Christmas, like, religiously.”

“Got any more?” Okabe asks.

“Of course!” Maho makes her way down the aisles and procures a second pair of reindeer antlers, which she jams onto Okabe’s head, and wraps the band for a second red nose around Kurisu’s head. “I saved the one that lights up for you,” she says cheerfully.

“I’m honored,” Kurisu says dryly as the red nose starts to glow. “Not a word.” This to Okabe, who is grinning so wide he feels his chapped lips start to crack.

“You were born to wear those,” Maho informs her.

“Both of you get out of my sight,” Kurisu snaps.

“I am actually leaving soon,” Maho says. “I’m wrapping up my last report and I’ll leave it in Dropbox. Do you want anything before I go?”

“Just for Aaron to call me back.”

“Well I can think rude thoughts at him from across the planet, but you haven’t discovered transpacific telepathy yet, or whatever it is you’re working on, so I don’t know if it’ll do much good.”

“I appreciate the offer.”

“You can help me, Maho,” Okabe says, standing and depositing Kurisu’s console with her things. He grabs Kurisu’s giftbag and rises. “Do you have a letter opener?”

“We might? In the back room, follow me.”

“Don’t help him, he’s cheating!” Kurisu shouts at their backs.

Maho leads him into the back offices and down a hallway into a row of desks littered with papers and snack remains. “What am I helping you cheat on?”

“No rules of engagement were established before we began opening gifts, therefore, nothing.” He holds up the bag for her to get a clear view of the knot. “I need help untying this. Basic politeness dictates that I not simply cut the thing in half, which is more courtesy than she gave my gift, tearing it apart with those small paws of hers in about three seconds flat.”

Maho starts digging in one of the desk drawers, unearthing tape dispensers and errant stapler pins. “And this is a contest?”

“Of a sort. If I untangle it before she wraps up work, I’m going to try to bully her into buying dinner.”

“ _Really_.” Maho raises her eyebrows, amused, and moves onto the next drawer. “That’s a tall threat on a Christmas date.”

 _Not a date_ , he almost says, a gut response. He’s pretty sure it’s pointless; not many single people would travel an hour out of the city to pick up another single friend, exchange gifts, wait all night for the single friend to wrap up work, and take that single friend to an arranged dinner on one of the most popular date nights in Japan.

He is well aware that it is, in fact, this very struggle to name their—relationship—that has stalled it for so long, leaving them both in emotional limbo as they wrestled with feelings across the Pacific. It had not gotten any easier when he went to study with Viktor Chondria in America for his graduate degree in mechanical engineering: They had then instead simply ignored each other across the state of California for most of the year, only communicating consistently to travel back to Japan together on their breaks.

By the time of Kurisu’s doctoral graduation, they came to a mutual unspoken agreement, as if by telepathy, that this game of romantic chicken had taken up too much time. Okabe’s future was still so up in the air—after years of impatiently powering through school, eager to get out into the world and _do_ , he found himself so paralyzed with the avenues now open to him, all of them trailing off in different directions and away from the lab and his friends and now so suddenly real, that the only solution he found to manage this anxiety was to return to the classroom and the familiar tedium of schoolwork in the form of a doctorate in engineering.

Kurisu, who had patiently nodded her way through all of his rantings about the uselessness of his degree and his itching to dive headfirst into the world as soon as he was hireble, had not teased him for turning tail and throwing himself back into her world of essays and academics, for which he is still profoundly grateful. He often wonders if she feels the same: that the world outside their bubble of academia is not right for them, or rather, that they are not right for it. Does she, too, ever feel as though she has outgrown the playroom that she has locked herself in, but can’t make herself step past the doorway into the unknowable future darkness beyond?

“No letter openers,” Maho tells him, bringing him back to the present. “But there is a pair of scissors, if you want to be a cheating cheater, like I would be.”

He focuses. She’s holding out a dissected pair of scissors, one of the handles twisted off from the pivot in the middle of the blade. “Never, madame. I’ll pry this blasted thing apart and deliver the ribbons back to her untethered as a show of my superior dexterity.”

Maho hands him the single blade. He sighs and takes it in hand, gripping the center, aiming the tip into the center to wedge a strand loose.

It takes a few tries to find some purchase. The damn thing is in an impressive state; he wonders dimly if anything short of a blowtorch would untangle it. Finally, he manages to wedge one curl of the ribbon loose enough to work the tip under it, and pushes through.

The knife moves with more force than expected, opening the knot wider—the tip of the blade pushes through it and on the other side, a sharp stab of pain hits his palms.

It takes a moment to realize what has happened. The blade is sticking out of his hand, quivering as his hand trembles, and his palm is already bloody, and

he

is

_with Mayuri in Akiba, blocking one of SERN’s Rounders from following her out the back door of Mr. Braun’s store, yelling at her to run, watching a gun aim down the alley, throwing his hand up in a desperate attempt to stop the bullet, feeling it shred through the muscle of his palm, watching blood spurt onto his white lab coat, hearing another Rounder greet Mayuri at the opening of the alley, she screams in surprise—_

_is with Kurisu in the Radio Building, dropping the bloody knife in horror, catching her as her knees stumble into his, listening to Nakabachi’s awful laughter, feeling his heart in his throat and knowing right this very second that her organs are failing her, he has failed her, he has failed her, he has failed, he has failed I failed I failed I failed I failed I failed_

“Okabe? Okabe!”

Holding her for the last time, counting out every second as she bleeds to death again, praying if it has to happen then please at least let it be quick, don’t let her suffer, god oh god oh god he can smell her blood and can’t see anything else

“I’m going to get Kurisu, okay? Stay right here—don’t move, please don’t move, don’t do anything, I’ll be right back—”

and now she’s crying and shaking in his arms, and trying to say something but he can’t hear around the rush in his ears, her mouth is moving and she’s saying _don’t let my father—_ and _why are you here—_ and _please don’t leave me, I don’t want to die alone—_ but all he’s hearing is that it’s his fault, his fault, your fault, Okabe Rintarou, your fault, you can’t even look at her after you’ve killed her—

“Okabe? Will you look at me?”

A gentle hand on his shoulder is the only thing that differentiates one moment and the next. Blinking, he sees a tiled floor again, bloodless. Feels the cold desk he’s pressed back up against. He is in a bright office room, not a dark hallway. He sees someone else in a lab coat is kneeling on his left. She has red hair. She isn’t bleeding from the abdomen. The only blood in the room is his.

He looks down. His hand is wrapped in a bandage. She has a bottle of ibuprofen in her other hand.

Kurisu is looking at him.

He thinks back to what she had said. Had she asked him a question? He can’t remember.

“Hey, Christina,” he manages. He sounds out of breath, and yet he hasn’t moved an inch.

Her face flickers into irritation and then, immediately after, relief. She spreads out her lab coat behind her and sits on the floor next to him, legs stretched out to match his pose.

“Maho’s getting you water,” she says. “I don’t know if you want it, but she needed something to do, and I figured if you wanted to talk to me alone… we have a few minutes.”

He holds a hand out wordlessly for the painkillers. She gives him two and he swallows them dry.

“It isn’t that deep,” she says. “I don’t think you need stitches. Do you want to go to the hospital to be sure?”

He shakes his head.

“Okay. Let me know if it starts hurting more than you can bear.”

He sighs. He doesn’t want to talk to her about it. He doesn’t want to talk about— _it_ —any more than he wants to _think_ about it, which is to say none at all, as he has been doing, for years. Ten years.

All this time, and he still…

They sit in silence for an unidentifiable length of time, as Okabe’s heart slowly calms to its resting state. He is aware that he is wasting time to talk to Kurisu before Maho comes back, if he wants to seize the chance to do so while she is gone… and yet he has nothing to say, nothing she doesn’t know already, and even if she didn’t know it, he couldn’t say it anyway. Kurisu says nothing, occasionally swaying her black shoes side to side, watching them. Waiting for him to take the first step.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he struggles to say, eventually.

She nods, as if she had expected this.

There’s quiet.

Maho must be giving them time. Getting a bottle of water from the vending machine doesn’t talk an eternity.

Hesitantly, Kurisu says, “I know you had a bad experience two years ago, but… we talked a little bit about you seeing a new therapist.”

“I’ve been busy.”

She nods. “I know, but…”

“You know I’ve been busy.”

“We’ve all been busy.”

“So why are you asking?”

“Because I think—” She runs a hand through her hair, searching for words. “Because I think, just, ignoring it, or putting it on the backburner for ages, isn’t the smart thing to do?” She immediately corrects: “Okay, it isn’t the _right_ thing to do. I think—it’s like a part of you. Part of your health. It’s like if you aren’t going to the doctor when something is wrong, then it might get worse. It’s like that but for your brain. If your brain tells you there’s something wrong, then it stands to reason that the best thing to do is to see a professional. QED.”

A bit irritated, and thrown off-kilter at the prospect of trying therapy again after a disastrous and mortifying ordeal previously, he says, “You’re the neurologist. Why don’t you just diagnose me, then?”

“I’m not a psychiatrist, or a counselor, for that matter, you know that.” 

Frustrated, he blurts out, “Well, the list of people I’d talk to about any of this stuff consists of about two people, and neither of them are a stranger, so your hypothesis is dead on arrival.”

“It _shouldn’t be_ , Rintarou, is what I’m saying—”

And just like that, they’re arguing again, and he hates it when they argue about serious stuff, but this time it hurts more than normal. He’s starving, his hands still feel shaky, Kurisu still refuses to understand his point of view on this, and he knows in that moment that they aren’t going to make their dinner reservation, and the date he planned so carefully for tonight is never going to happen—he’ll be lucky if they leave together in the same bus. 

He stands up.

“Do you need some air?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ll be back.”

He grabs his bag and coat when he leaves the lab. She doesn’t follow him. 

* * *

Okabe stands outside the building doors and wishes vaguely that he was the type of person to smoke, if only because it might have given him an excuse to do something with his hands as he watches the dark parking lot. Perhaps there exists another worldline out there in which he smokes. He still associates cigarettes vaguely with American teenagers trying to look cool—he’d never dilute his senses with the smell of nicotine—but thinking about America has him thinking about Kurisu again, and what she gets up to when she’s there and he’s here.

The parking lot is dark and empty. He only sees a few cars at the far end; probably the security team. The light from the building spreads a few meters into the darkness, and beyond the boundaries of the university labs, the darkness of the night chirps birdsong at him, occasionally rustles in the wind.

He does not think about her calling up her research partner in America and saying, _I had a fight with my weirdo boyfriend again. I don’t even know why I bother with him_. He does not think about her research partner saying in return, _I’m sorry. Do you want to talk about it? I won’t blow up on you for talking about my feelings like he does._

Kurisu will always be Kurisu. He doesn’t know why he gets so angry at her for trying to help. She even puts her help into language he understands, that he works best in, but it’s all to disguise the truth that he just cannot stomach: _You are sick, and you need help_.

He’s fine, is the thing. He really is. Most days are normal. He doesn’t think about worldlines at all. He wakes up. Goes to work. Meets Mayuri for lunch. Sees Daru and Suzuha on weekends. Fools around with his gadgets. Responds to posts online. Video-calls Kurisu if she’s not in Tokyo, crashes in her hotel room if she is. And he doesn’t mind how busy he is, because he _likes_ keeping busy; he likes that they’re both busy, he’s relieved that they are both employed enough that they can _stay_ busy on someone else’s dime, certainly. Her being the smarter of them both doesn’t rankle so much anymore. Any lingering feelings of inadequacy or shame over her accomplishments and prodigiousness vanished the moment of her PhD graduation ceremony. Her father, obviously, had not been in attendance—but to his shock, her mother hadn’t been there either, on vacation in Miami with her new husband.

Both of Okabe’s parents had showed up. They went out to lunch together after. His mom, busybody that she was, had asked her all about America, and what kind of food she eats over there, if she ever saw celebrities in New York. His father, the nerdier of the two, wanted to know about her research, even though he didn’t understand most of it; he had been very impressed by her speech, and over the meal, often asked her to repeat or explain things. Okabe had been embarrassed, but Kurisu had not minded at all—she talked to them all through the meal, and asked lots of questions about the store. She seemed genuinely charmed by the fact that his parents ran a family business together. At first he’d thought she was making fun of them, but her interest was genuine. It took him too long to realize that she was _envious_ ; that she wanted what _he_ had.

When they had gone back to her hotel that night, they ordered takeout and stayed in. She had held him all night long, and he had been grateful: to be there with her when she was vulnerable, to be let into the heart of someone as wonderful as Makise Kurisu. He’d felt, then, that he understood: This is what he wanted. This is what he had fought so hard for.

Perhaps this will just forever remain his one hangup. He had struggled so hard to reach this world, reach Steins Gate, that to acknowledge something was wrong—fundamentally, awfully wrong, not with the world, but with _him_ —was a testament to some other failure on his part that he could not explain or rectify. Was he incompatible with this reality? Was this just the price he paid?

The sound of a door opening snaps him back to the present. _Please don’t be her._

“Hey,” Maho says as she comes up from behind him. “I thought you were still up there.”

She hands him a water bottle. It takes a minute for him to realize that she had been sent on an errand to get one for him half an hour or, oh, some small eternity ago.

He takes it. He’s not thirsty, but he drinks some anyway. At this reminder of his injury, his hand throbs, but he feels no pain. The blood has dried on the bandage.

“How’s the hand?”

“It’s fine. Thanks for this.” 

“You’re welcome. She feels bad,” Maho suddenly blurts. “I know she doesn’t show it, but she worries about you a lot. She doesn’t want to come on too strong.”

“She doesn’t have to worry." And then, because it’s Maho he is speaking to, who knows Kurisu better than anyone else alive except perhaps him, he feels comfortable saying: “She’s stronger than the both of us. It’s not something to be embarrassed about. I don’t know why she hides her feelings like that.”

“I’ll ignore the hypocrisy of that for a minute to remind you that she was told the opposite her entire life. So, you know, you’ve done good getting through all those thick layers of distrust, skepticism, hostility, and loneliness.” Maho pulls on her gloves. “You going in or leaving?”

He looks back at the doors. “Just saying out for a minute.”

“You can’t stay out here forever. It’s freezing. At least wait inside the doors.”

He can’t come up with a good reason not to, but something about the principle of the thing roots his feet in place and he can’t take a step forward, or back.

Maho sighs. “Fine. Here, take my ID in case you change your mind.”

He blinks when she passes it to him. “You don’t need this?”

“I’m flying back to California tomorrow and I won’t be back until the New Year. Kurisu can give it back to me in January.”

“You’re leaving the day after Christmas to spend the holiday with family?”

“Yeah, I usually beg off every year saying I’m busy, but it’s been, like, five years since I’ve seen my parents in person and I figure I should show my face at least once in a while so they don’t forget what I look like.” She smiles. “Christmas isn’t a holiday in Japan, so I can justifiably say I have work today, and then I can show up after all my extended family has gone home and all the embarrassing stuff like present-giving and mistletoe-kissing is over with.”

“Mistletoe-kissing?”

“Maybe it’s an American thing. You hang mistletoe at the top of a doorframe and whenever two people pass through the door at the same time, they have to kiss. It’s a beloved trick by parents everywhere if you’re trying set up your single career-focused daughter or niece with your friend’s son of the same age and force the both of them to awkwardly lock lips with each other, so I avoid the whole thing by arriving a day after all the company has gone home.”

“You have it all figured out.”

Maho rolls her eyes, checks her bag and pockets one last time, then takes out her bus pass. “See you. Happy New Year.”

She heads off into the darkness in the direction of the bus stop, and Okabe watches long after her tiny white coat has followed the street lamps down to the edge of the parking lot, then turned a corner and disappeared into the night.

* * *

“Are you really arguing with me about this?” Kurisu is spitting to her phone in English when he returns to the lab. Her bun is falling loose, stray hairs dangling in her face, and her makeup has all been smeared off. Her phone is sitting innocently on the counter in a way that belies the ferocity of the conversation being held.

“— _Really_ , Kurisu?” Whoever is on the other line is pronouncing her name wrong. “I got up at five in the morning for this, _on Christmas Eve_ , and you’re telling _me_ I’m not doing enough?!”

“Well, then, imagine waiting nine hours for photos before you can wrap up this report, unable to do anything until they come in, and then when they arrive, it’s almost nine PM, you’re late for Christmas dinner, and they’re _still_ blurry and you can’t see the cells!”

“Jesus Christ! If you wanted it done your way, then you, I don’t know, could have DONE THEM WHILE YOU WERE STILL IN NEW YORK.”

“Thank you for pointing out, Aaron! I _did_ do the samples while I was still in New York, and your technician _dropped them onto the goddamn floor_ while he was cleaning the machines, for which he has still not apologized—”

Okabe thinks briefly that the poor phone doesn’t deserve the abuse being hurled through it.

When she’s done about two minutes later, it ends on a definitive agreement that Aaron-in-New-York will redo the images and send them within an hour for Kurisu to download from the VPN. There is a more vague understanding between both parties that this was all Aaron’s fault for not following her instructions to the letter, Kurisu’s fault for not providing clearer instructions, the tech’s fault for causing this catastrophe in the first place, and Jesus’s fault for having his birthday at such an inconvenient time. At that understanding, she hangs up the phone.

“I need to leave academia,” Kurisu growls into her palms, and then plants her forehead straight down onto the laminated pages of her binder. “I’m going to do it. I need to get out of here. I can’t do this anymore.”

Okabe pays this no mind; she says this sort of thing at least once a month. He wanders to her seat and places his uninjured hand at the base of her neck in a V-shape, loosely massaging the muscles there. She jumps.

“It’s me,” Okabe says. “Is this how people normally speak to each other in Manhattan?”

“No,” she sighs. “It’s how I speak to people when I’m frustrated.”

“You never speak to me like that.”

“I’ve learned to pick my battles with you.” She drags the other chair over with her heel and gestures for him to take a seat. After a moment of hesitation, he takes it.

Silence again.

“Look, I—”

“Okabe—”

They stop.

“Go ahead,” she says, looking very much as though she would rather be going first.

“I’m, er,” he tries. “Sorry for arguing. I know you’re probably right. I don’t like to fight about this stuff.”

Kurisu stares at him, confused. “We didn’t fight.” She points at her phone. “ _That_ was a fight.”

Okabe eyes her, skeptical. “Americans have twisted your sense of social norms. You’ve forgotten about what it’s like to get in a passive-aggressive stand-off.”

“I know exactly what it’s like. I just don’t see the point in beating around the bush. If you’re angry with me, we’re going to fight. If you’re frustrated or need space or something, then we’re just having a disagreement.”

She has a point, as always, but it still feels wrong to snap at Kurisu the way he did, when it comes to something this serious.

“Here,” she says finally. She hands him her gift, the little red bag with the green ribbon, which has been loosened significantly—no, wait, it hasn’t been. Parts of it have been cut away.

“I tried out a fancy gift-tying technique I saw online, but I must’ve messed it up.” She shrugs, not meeting his eyes. “Doesn’t seem fair, so I just cut through it. I don’t want you to miss out on your gift.”

“And I,” he says, pulling something out from his pocket, “got you a snack from the vending machine, to tide you over.”

“How romantic.” She takes it anyway and starts chewing on a strawberry-flavored Kit Kat.

He accepts the gift in exchange and threads his finger through the largest loop, untying the loose collection of ribbon. Pieces fall away.

Inside is a $300 gift card, along with a business card.

He blinks. Money seems a rather impersonal gift, and he tries to brush off the disappointment to focus on the other piece of paper. Did she order custom business cards for him or the lab, maybe…?

No, there’s a name printed here for a company in America: SmartSolutions. The name under it, Sara Nakamura, is one he doesn’t recognize.

He flips it over, hoping clarity might be found, but on the back there is only an American phone number, scribbled quickly.

This means nothing to him. Baffled, he looks up at Kurisu.

“I won the gift card in a raffle at a convention in Tucson.” Kurisu flushes now. He can’t imagine why. “The lady giving out the prize worked at SmartSolutions and we got to talking. I realized that they didn’t really have anything I want, but… well, SmartSolutions has tons of 3D printers. I was going to buy you a cheap one but I didn’t know what kind you’d like. She’s a salesperson who works in Asian markets, so I figured she could just talk to you and I thought you might like the printer for… y’know, the lab or something, or maybe your Rube Goldberg machines… I thought this would be better than another weird antique pendulum I found at a yard sale or something. But she knows to expect you so, just, call her any time, if you want it.”

It clicks. He puts the cards down and takes her face, pressing a wet, sloppy kiss to her forehead. She groans and pushes him away half-heartedly, but he only moves down to her cheek instead, and then he’s kissing her nose and face all over, and she’s snorting, and has pressed her chair closer to his and has her arms around him.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Mm.” Which means _you’re welcome_. Or maybe _I’m glad you’re glad but too embarrassed to admit it_.

“You don’t know the chaos you’ve just brought upon the world. The Future Gadgets Lab will never be the same.”

“I think the world will survive. Just promise me you won’t let Daru use it. I don’t want to know my gift has been used to create models of his 2D girlfriends or whatever.”

Okabe doesn’t think Daru has the time to play eroge with his and Yuki’s hands full of a three-year-old Suzuha, but he keeps that thought to himself.

“I like my gift too,” Kurisu says, blushing furiously. “Thank you.”

“I know you do.”

Her phone rings.

Kurisu sighs, declines the call, and tosses it back onto her coat with her things.

“That might be Aaron,” he says.

She makes a face. “He’ll live. It’ll wait till tomorrow.” She turns back to Okabe and puts his arms around his neck. “The book club stuff reminded me. I think you’d like one of the books we’re reading. It’s about female Black American mathematicians and how they helped the space race.”

“Is it in Japanese?”

“Well, maybe there’s a translation. I don’t know, actually. I rented my copy. But I think your English is decent enough. You can rent it from my library.”

“Sorry, _whose_ library?”

“Well—”

“Did you just recommend an American book to me, written in American English, and presume I get an American ID card to rent it from an American library?”

“Okay, maybe I didn’t think that far ahead. But I thought you’d like it since you’re thinking about that aerospace engineering thing. And I think it’d be hard to find in Japan, but admittedly I haven’t looked.”

“Curse that New York Public Library of yours, nerfing our accessibility to the same literature.”

“Can you _please_ not talk in leetspeak in the real world?”

“That wasn’t leet, that’s just common millennial vernacular. And nobody calls internet slang ‘leet’ anymore, at-channeler.”

“You’re incorrigible. Tell me about the job offer, though. I forgot to ask about that.”

He pauses. “The one at JAXA? I haven’t given much thought to it.”

“Come on, I know that’s not true… I’ve thought about it a lot, so I know you’ve thought about it even more.”

It is true, he has. And yet, he’s been considering turning it down for one simple reason: It wouldn’t let him visit America nearly as often as he’d want. But they don’t have launch pads or manufacturing hubs in New York. It’s been easy, turning down offers for the boring stuff, like making drone cameras, and he certainly doesn’t want to make his living in the obvious sectors, like petroleum or JISHA compliance. The thought of working in an office all day makes him want to slam his head into a filing cabinet.

He still feels embarrassed by this, frustrated that he cannot make a simple decision as to what field he wants to work in. He futzed around as a lab assistant for a while, couldn’t wait to finish his master’s degree, and now that he is on the other side, he finds himself at a complete loss.

“It’s all moot until I finish my program,” he says.

“Yeah, but it’s a good sign multiple places are willing to wait for you. How long do you have to decide?”

“The new year, when they’re back in office. They have a lot of American ex-pats so they take the holidays off.”

“That late? That’s amazing. They probably really want you, then.”

He grunts, and then, desperate to change the subject, jokes, “I could always forget the corporate world and make a living off my MewTube channel.”

Kurisu rolls her eyes. “Ten thousand views a month is great, but it’s not enough to live off of.”

“So you say. Once I hit a million subscribers, I’ll be unstoppable. A million people who love watching me answer rudimentary science questions in character, who can’t wait to see which Goldbergs I’ll come up with next.”

“Well, I refuse to date a MewTuber, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to get a real job.”

“So quick to judge,” he grins. “MewTubers are the backbone of modern society.”

“There are tons of science channels contributing to free and broader education, I will admit, but they’re rarely peer-reviewed or fact-checked, and just, I have a lot of thoughts on those video trends, but that’s a topic for another day.” She puts a hand to her forehead. “I’m sure plenty of people enjoy that life. But I don’t think it’s for you, I mean, unless you want to spend all day and night talking to a camera and editing videos. Daru can only edit them for you because you only make one video a week.”

He doesn’t like the idea of making a living like that—he likes the simplicity of filming the Goldbergs in his lab, and answering questions for teenagers online who are having trouble with homework, sure, but—

“I don’t mean to shoot you down, except when I love to shoot you down,” Kurisu says, and he laughs. “I just don’t think it’s for you, is what I mean.”

“Easy for you to say,” he says. At her questioning look, he blurts before he can stop himself, “You’re doing work that actually helps people.”

Kurisu looks at him, startled. “You think that you aren’t?”

Embarrassed, he looks away, over to her work at the electroencephalogram. “Look at what you’re doing now.”

“Well,” she says, and stops. She doesn’t seem to know what to say. They both know Kurisu has a bright future ahead of her, mainly for the simple reason that she could have _anything_ ahead of her: working on the cure for Parkinson’s, or creating simulated realities for the human conscious, or whatever else that piques her interest. She seems satisfied with her work at the university, but she could go anywhere, and they both know it.

Okabe’s jaunt into particle physics in his first graduate school had been illuminating and even thrilling at times, but was plagued with doubts, and ultimately brief. It ended suddenly and abruptly when a distant colleague, now working in Switzerland, reached out after reading one of Okabe’s papers on the hierarchy problem. He had extended a hearty greeting, and with it, an invitation to visit the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva for a researcher position.

His hands had shaken so hard that Kurisu had had to type the declining response for him.

He dropped out of the program the next day, and the following week, after long internal debate, began making the transition to aerospace engineering.

“There’s always teaching. At the university, or for grade schools. Your videos are a hit with kids.”

He sighs.

“Hey.” She reaches up and tugs on a strand of his hair. “Sorry to push. You don’t have to figure it out now.”

He nods. “What time is it?”

“A bit past 21:00.”

He groans.

“What? That’s not too late.”

“Yeah, until you factor in the commute back to the city, and then the transit to the restaurant, and then remember it closes at 23:00…”

“We’re not making it to your dinner, are we.”

“I think that ship has sailed.”

“I’m sorry, Okabe.”

“It’s fine. We can always raid the vending machines for dinner.”

“You know,” she says, “Christmas Day is actually December 25, right? Japan celebrates it a day early.”

He blinks. He remembers that vaguely from the few times he has spent the holiday in America, but he hadn’t considered Kurisu, being raised there, might want to celebrate it on the 25th, not 24th. It would certainly make getting a new reservation easier… 

She stands now and grabs her coat and bag, tucking the plushie in the front pouch. “I have a better idea. Let’s go back to my hotel in Ochanomizu.” 

“You don’t want to wait for your images? You had other stuff to wrap up.”

Kurisu looks back at her phone for a minute as if seriously considering it. Then she takes her hair down from what remains of its bun, and, quite uncharacteristically, swears. “Fuck it. I’ve been working for fourteen hours. I won’t be able to analyze the samples properly until tomorrow morning anyway. Let’s go.” When his eyes widen at her uncharacteristic language, she laughs. “We’ll do our proper not-date tomorrow. Tonight, we’ll order room service and watch anime and update Tapioca Island.”

“A night to make all of the other couples dining out at KFC tonight jealous.”

“Y’know, Daru and Yuki actually would kill for a night like ours. No irony. An evening in a nice hotel room eating takeout watching TV is something first-time parents of a toddler can only dream of.”

He hadn’t thought about it like that. After packing up their gifts and snacks, they head out into the night, and he flicks the lights off when they leave.

By the time they arrive at the dark bus stop, Okabe is rubbing his wrist; his palm is not quite hurting, but throbbing regularly. Fingers red from the cold, he rubs them together then shoves them into his pockets.

“Are you sure you don’t want to see a clinic?”

“Positive.” At her skeptical look, he says, “I promise I’m fine. If it looks bad in the morning, I’ll go.” 

She looks satisfied with that, and opens her phone to check the bus schedule. The cold doesn’t seem to affect her at all. She looks so pretty by the light of the streetlamp, standing there in her tan coat and scarf, with her long red hair fluttering from under a black knit cap. Okabe is struck with a sudden thought to put his arm around her, but he’s frozen still, even after all they’ve done and said tonight. _She’s with you_ , his mind says, _she won’t mind_ , and _for god’s sake, you’ve gone to third base with her_ , yet his hand stays in his pocket, fist clenched, as if he’s preparing to go to war.

“My watch is fine,” he manages, eventually.

Kurisu looks up at him.

“It works fine,” he says. “It always has. It’s—just that, sometimes.” He licks his lips. “Sometimes when there’s something I’m looking forward to, or dreading, like an interview—or this, tonight—sometimes I stare at it and watch it for ages. Minutes, or sometimes hours. That’s why I was late. I just get lost in it, I guess.”

Kurisu doesn’t say anything. She turns to look out at the dark houses across the street, chewing her lip.

“I end up staring at it for hours,” he says quietly, and now he’s looking anywhere but her. “It’s like I—need to know time is still moving. In the right direction. If I take my eyes off it for a second, it’ll stop. And I know I need to get up, I need to get going or I’ll be late, but I just can’t move.”

She doesn’t reply.

“I know it’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” she says, and she will never know how relieved he is to hear those words. “But I don’t know how to help you.”

He nods, then mimics her, looking out at the house across the way too for something to do, because the possibility of looking at her and seeing pity in her face is too much to bear right now.

“Mayuri… recommended a psychotherapist.” Getting the words out feels like talking around tar. “I still have the number…”

“You want me to make the appointment?”

“Nah, that’s fine,” he says, heart racing at her offer. “I just… you think, this thing with my watch and all. And I’m still—having those episodes. You think that means something’s wrong with my brain?”

Kurisu freezes. He knows she’s regretting her earlier words, but he doesn’t want her to take them back; he wants her honest opinion.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she says quietly. “But if all of this is still affecting your… day-to-day, then I think they could help you figure out this… mental block you’re having.”

He considers it.

“Don’t think of it like being sick, if it helps. Think of it like solving a problem.”

At that, he nods. “I make no promises with the appointment,” he says.

“Okay. Do you want me to come with you?”

“Well, maybe.” Trying to find some familiar ground in teasing her, he says, “It might make up for the shame of making me travel an hour alone to get here like a Christmas loner while all the couples on the bus judged me.”

“Don’t tell me you were wallowing in self-pity all the way here.” She rolls her eyes. “You’re not a kuribocchi, you have someone. Help me with this.” She un-loops her scarf from around her neck and wordlessly holds the ends out to Okabe, because she knows he likes to tie the knots in ridiculous designs that make it difficult for her untangle. But he’s still frozen.

He has a someone. A girl. Kurisu is his someone. Kurisu is his girl. He’s familiar, of course, with the feeling of having her, yes, is familiar with the, well, mechanics of it—but—

It’s just. He likes to _think_ of her as his, and vice versa. Whether or not she does, too, is often a recurring subject of internal agitation. Said out loud, like that… somehow means something different than all the times she has teasingly called him something so childish as a “boyfriend.” 

Kurisu, irritated, shakes the scarf. He gathers up the ends and ties them into a huge, gaunty bow underneath her chin.

“Loser,” she says affectionately.

“Assistant,” he says, and in the corner of his eye, he sees headlights cut through the darkness as the bus rumbles down the road toward them.

“Hey.” Kurisu catches his attention a few minutes later, after they’ve paid and hopped on. Warmer in here, she unties the scarf. She settles into his side on the empty bus as it heaves forward. She hesitates, struggling with something for a minute, then grabs his arm and puts it around her shoulders, and leans back.

“We’re okay, aren’t we?”

He relaxes, looking for the blur of dark trees outside the window beneath the glare of the lights inside the bus. Their two images reflect back at him, all he can see. He’s thinking about the future, and what’s coming next, and has a strange phenomenon of seeing his trouble from outside of himself, realizing that he has left weights behind only after he no longer carries them. They might be back tomorrow, weighing him down—yet he no longer feels as though he’s alone and struggling to stay above water with them in a dark ocean in the middle of the night, as was the feeling for so many years. He has company, and a paddle, and the light of the moon to see by, and this lumbering boat that is leading him some place familiar, some place warm.

“Yeah. We’ll be fine.”

* * *

“Metaphysically speaking, you and I are intrinsically and inexplicably linked. And I’m convinced  
our true purpose is to connect with each other, if not help save each other’s lives.  
In another world, hopefully, you are doing the same for me.”  
— _Russian Doll_

**Author's Note:**

> The Big List of References and Rip-Offs:
> 
>   * The plot of this fic was loosely inspired by _New Girl_ Season 1 Episode 13, which is a fantastic sitcom if you enjoy bantering friends-to-lovers like Okabe and Kurisu.
>   * “Equivalent exchange” is from _Fullmetal Alchemist_. 
>   * Many of the game references are probably obvious (World of Warcraft, Fire Emblem, Overwatch, League of Legends). Okabe is playing Animal Crossing on Kurisu’s Switch. “Genji main” is a (usually) playful insult for someone who plays Genji on Overwatch, which is a stereotype for someone who spends most of their playtime running at the enemy head-first, often die quickly, and is the type of person to spam the message for “Heal me!” when they’re at 199/200 health. 
>   * A [Rube Goldberg machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine%C2%A0) “is a machine intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way.” They deal heavily in physics and use both simple and complicated objects to make interesting patterns or motions. I thought that they would definitely be something Okabe could get into as a hobby as he got older. Some examples: [How to Pass the Salt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nORRgU8sGdE) and [The Journey of a Blue Marble](https://thathopeyetlives.tumblr.com/post/633638384986882048/). 
>   * The book Kurisu mentions is [“Hidden Figures” by Margot Lee Shetterly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures_\(book\)), which is better known for its 2016 film adaptation starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe.
>   * Okabe writes his paper on the [hierarchy problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_problem), which in theoretical physics is the large discrepancy between aspects of the weak force and gravity.
>   * A [kuribocchi](https://takashionary.com/bocchi/) is a person who spends Christmas alone. After childhood, Christmas in Japan is seen as more of a romantic holiday spent with couples, so Japanese adults might call themselves a kuribocchi if they have no one to spend Christmas with. _Kuri_ is short for “Christmas” (kurisumasu) and _bocchi_ means “loner.” 
>   * _Russian Doll_ , from which the epigraph is from, is a fantastic show if you like dark comedy Groundhog Day/time loop stories with discussions of loneliness, depression, and the power of human connection. Someone on tumblr charmingly called it “heart-centered sci-fi,” a category which I think Steins;Gate also falls under.
> 



End file.
